Righting Wrongs

I call it unfortunate that one side effect of being a novelist is noticing when many of the terrible things I write as fiction occur in daily life. I used to wonder if I was somehow writing these horrors into existence. Then I began to wonder if it was prescience and this was how my psyche dealt with what presented itself to me, by writing it as fiction and therefore creating mental distance from the darkness.
When the facts about the Henderson twins, Kellie and Kathie, and their years of sexual abuse at the hands of their father and brothers came to light last year I was reminded that once again, truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s twice as ugly and three times as distasteful.
The Henderson’s were rescued by a well-meaning neighbor who could not keep silent (unlike the mother of the twins.) A series of articles on the Henderson twins and what they suffered are available at: http://www.kansas.com/promise/
I missed them when they were Oprah, but I didn’t need to see their story because I had already written it—in a sense—and ended it the way any woman with a damaged, tortured soul and no hope of justice would. Maybe that’s why I write what I write. To fictionally right the wrongs that can never truly be righted in the living world…at least not to our satisfaction.